Price cuts to boost 'lukewarm' Grantsdale demand - report

Intel's 'Grantsdale' chipset family has not proved as tempting for consumers and the vendors who supply them as the chip giant had anticipated, it has been claimed.

The upshot will be a series of autumn price cuts designed to boost take-up of the new desktop platform.

So say Taiwanese mobo maker and channel sources cited by DigiTimes. Describing interest in the i915P and i915L chipsets, Socket T Pentium 4s and PCI Express graphics cards as "lukewarm", the sources allege that demand has instead focused on Intel's older, i845 and i865 series of chipsets.

That's not entirely surprising. The summer isn't perhaps the ideal time to push a consumer-oriented multimedia-enhanced platform, particularly one geared toward the upper end of the mainstream consumer desktop market.

Intel cut i865 and i845 prices in June to boost demand, but even then industry sources were saying there are simply too many of the older chipsets out there already. It appears that over-supply is now easing, which should favour the newer chipsets, particularly as the industry moves into the 'back to school' period.

Later this month, Intel will cut the prices of 775-pin P4s, it is believed, while introducing 775-pin Celerons that can also take advantage of the i915 series of chipsets.

That should give the platform a boost and could well sideline the older Socket 478 CPUs and chipsets. Further price cuts, if they take place in late September as the sources suggest, should strengthen the platform further as the industry gears up for the holiday sales period. Ditto the anticipated low-end additions to the i915 family expected to ship later this quarter.

By then, Intel should be in a better position to trumpet Grantsdale's Wi-Fi support, played down to date because of a dearth of WLAN add-in chips and cards. Improved availability of PCI Express graphics cards should help too, though Intel's own integrated graphics engine is likely to corner the consumer market, much to ATI and Nvidia's annoyance. ®

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